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Case File: Halliday, Paul (1893)
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A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART ------ Mrs. Halliday’s Cheerful Story of Her Career of Murder, Robbery and Immorality. ------ CONCEALING HER VICTIMS. ------ Travellers Lured Into Her Hut Near Newburg to Be Poisoned, Shot and Robbed ------ MYSTERIES OF THE OLD LEAD MINES ------ Her Description of the Killing of Old Paul Halliday and the Two McQuillan Women ------ SIX HUSBANDS AND ONE CHILD. ------ An Interesting Chapter of Mrs. Halliday’s Early Life in Washington County ------ ROBBERY USUALLY HER ONLY MOTIVE ------ Many of the Extraordinary Details of Her Crimes Carefully Verified by World Reporters. ------
Mrs. Lizzie Halliday, the triple murderess, now confined in the Monticello jail, perhaps more nearly parallels in murderous instinct Lucresia Borgia, of the sixteenth century, than any woman of modern times.
A Woman of ungovernable passions, avaricious and devoid of the feeblest degree of human affection, she cheerfully recounted to Nellie Bly the catalog of her victims as accurately as she could remember. Much of her extraordinary narrative has been carefully verified by World reporters.
“Lizzie!” I called, very sweetly and coaxingly; “Lizzie, are you asleep? May I come in?” “Certainly, if you don’t mind me being in bed,” Lizzie responded, warmly
Deputy John undoes the bars and the Sheriff takes the lantern and we go inside.
Lizzie Halliday is sitting up in bed. Her hair, turning color, as the Sheriff says, like a snake, is hanging loosely over her shoulders. She wears a white canton flannel undergarment; it is higher than they usually are in the neck, and has little bits of sleeves over the shoulders, but she has on no nightrobe.
“I am so glad to see you,” Lizzie says, cordially, grasping my hand and holding it close in her strong grasp. “Are you well?”
Her face is beaming; a smile is on her lips and her small eyes sparkle.
“I am well” I answer her, “and you?”
“Very much better. I remember everything now that I had forgotten when you were here before, so I told this dear, good man” (giving the Sheriff a fond glance) “to send for you”
Which little remark shows that she remembered very well just what she did not tell me, and that she had her wits about her when she talked to me before. She would not tell me her story that night, though it was but 9 o’clock.
“It is a long story,” she said, “and it is of many murders besides those already known. I won’t speak a word until morning. It will take all day to tell you everything, and I mean to tell you everything.”
Imagine the curiosity and impatience that haunted my sleep! For the first time in my life I was anxious to get up and I did get up at an hour that would have given me a chill of horror in town. After breakfast, the Sheriff and I went to the cell, where we spent the entire day with Lizzie Halliday, listening to her story, questioning her, doubting her, scolding her. Seated in our old places on the bed, having refused Lizzie’s offer of the chair, which she occupied, facing us and with her side to the window that enabled me to watch the expressions of her face, we waited.
“Well?” Lizzie ejacualted, inquiringly, half smiling, her hands idle in her lap. “Where shall I begin?”
“At the beginning,” I replied. “Tell me of the murderers at your home in Walker Valley.”
She hesitated a moment and then said slowly: “There is a gang there that make a business of killing and robbing. Peddlers are their great prey, but they take everything that comes along. They have parties in town who tell girls in disreputable houses that if they steal money or jewelry they can find them a place to hide. The girls are sent to Walker Valley and drugged and killed.”
“Who composes this gang?””
“A big number of people. Many I don’t know. But I don’t dare to tell on them or they will kill me”
“Tell me of some of the murders they have committed”
“Well, in one night they killed two old men. They said they were sailors and had a tin box that the gang thought held money. The sailors thought they were going out to a summer boarding-house. On the way they were given drugged whiskey and when they got to the house they were shot. Two bad girls, who had stolen pocket-books, were killed the same night and in the same way.”
“What was done with the bodies?”
“They were put in the barn and burned up. Wood was piled on the embers to burning up every bit of them so there would be nothing left to tell the story. Of course the gang got the insurance on the barn as well as the money they murdered for.”
“What was the next murder?”
“It was some peddlers and two girls who thought they were going to a ball. They put on their best clothes and all their jewelry, and when they got to our house they said: ‘We thought you were taking us to a ball. Have you brought us here to murder us?’ They were drugged and shot and their bodies cut up into pieces, the largest not being more than a pound. It was intended to take them in a bag to the river when it came night again. – I spread horse feed over the stairs, for all this murdering was done upstairs, so that I would know if anyone went up. Paul Halliday’s crazy son did go upstairs, and his father was afraid he would tell, so three fires were built in the house, one in the cellar, one on the first floor, and one on the top floor. The crazy boy was pushed inside, the door was locked and he wa burned to death.
“How was the murdering usually done?”
“The gang made a habit of driving along the roads and asking people if they didn’t want to ride a little way. They would then offer them a drink of drugged whiskey, and if a good chance offered the body was robbed and left on the road. If not, they were brought to our house.”
“What did they do then?”
“Take all their clothes off and shoot them. Then they would wrap them up this way,” winding a strip of cloth around and around her hand, “until you couldn’t see a bit of them. It might be pigs, or anything , from the looks. Then they would take the bodies and throw them into the lead mines and other hiding places.”
“Tell me about the McQuillan murder. I’m more interested in that,” I said at last, after some moments of silence.
“There were people murdered the same night,” she said, thoughtfully.
“Who were they?”
“Peddlers, as far as I know. They had packs and I heard them say they were peddlers. They were drugged, so that when they reached the shanty they had to lift them out of the wagon, one taking their head and another their feet to get them into the house. They were drugged so they couldn’t move. Then they were undressed and shot.”
“Where were they shot?”
“Where it would do the most good,” she answered, grimly, placing her hand over her heart. “They were always shot in the heart, and many times, to make a sure job.”
“What was done with the bodies?”
“They were wrapped,” showing me as she had before, “from their feet to their head. They wrapped them in calico they took from one of the packs”
“What did they do with the bodies?”
“How do I know, dearie?” She asked, suddenly suspicious. “I only know it took three nights to hide all the bodies.”
“Your husband’s, the peddler’s and the McQuillan women” I suggested
“Yes”
“Why did you kill the McQuillan women/” the Sheriff asked
“I didn’t do it. I was outside, looking in the window. I had nothing to do with it. I saw a bullet fired into my husband’s heart and I saw a man pull him over to the corner. The McQuillan women were sitting on the sofa and then he shot them.”
“Were they drugged?”
“I guess so. They had been drinking”
“But they were shot after being dressed?”
“Yes”
“Then they were unconscious?”
“I heard the one,” she answered, slowly, “moan when she was hit and then she opened her eyes and said: “My God! Did you bring me here to murder me?”
When Lizzie Halliday told me this, I was thrilled with horror. I knew that she was telling me the death scene of either Mrs. McQuillan or her daughter. What agony that poor half-drugged victim must have suffered at that instant of returning consciousness! “DId they live long after the first shot?” I asked.
“I don’t know. They moaned a great deal, so I know they weren’t dead. But enough shots were put in at last to finish them.”
“Was your husband beaten before he was shot?”
“No, he was not, I swear before heaven. He was shot and dragged to the corner.”
“He was shot before the women?”
“Yes, but after the peddlers.”
“I should have thought that with such wholesale killing the shanty would have been swimming in blood”
“Sometimes when people are drugged they don’t bleed at all.” She answered promptly. “To guard against the blood horse blankets are placed under them, and if there is any blood it soaks into the blankets.”
“You know all these murders so well, but you did not commit them?”
“No. I could not help myself. I watched through the window and saw the gang do it.”
Since my first account of Lizzie Halliday, in which her maiden name was made known for the first time, Mr. McQuillan, who swore before the Grand Jury that he never saw Mrs. Halliday before she came to his house for his wife, now further complicates matters by confessing that he has known Mrs. Halliday’s people in Ireland, and came over at the same time. She had visited at his home and he once at hers.
When I told Lizzie that McQuillan had confessed so much she was delighted.
“Prove what I have told you and then come back. You will see there is a gang but I daren’t tell, or they will kill me”
I spent the entire day to make her say why she went for the McQuillan women and tell me if she murdered them alone and unaided. She refused absolutely to reply either one way or the other. I then asked her if she had ever married anybody before she married Paul Halliday.
“They say,” she said slowly, “that I was married once before I married Halliday. That is true, but they say I married in Ireland and killed my husband. That is not true, and no one has any idea who I married. I was a child when my parents brought me to this country, and when I was between fourteen and sixteen I married an old army soldier – ‘Ketspool’ Brown, he said his name was and I had one child by him, a boy, and the only child I ever had.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“They say I killed him, but they lie,” she cries furiously. “They lie, as God is above. You can prove it. My boy is now about twelve years old. They took him from me, and I’ve never been able to find him since.”
“Who took him from you?”
“The authorities in Philadelphia. They put him in some home there.”
“Why did they take him?” I demand.
“I was insane,” she answers when I press the question.
“How did you get to Philadelphia? Was your husband there?”
“No; he was dead. I went after he died. You can prove how he died” – quickly – “I had a doctor to attend him, and that doctor will swear that he died of typhoid fever. That can be proved, no matter what any one tries to say. Typhoid fever; they, none of the neighbors would come near the house.”
“Did your husband die in Philadelphia?”
“No; he died in Arlington – near Troy, it is – and there I buried him. He was the father of my boy, little Charlie Hopkins, that I heaven’t seen since they took him from me, five years or more ago.”
“For whom did you name your son?” I asked.
“His father,” she says, to my surprise.
“But you said his name was Ketspool Brown” I remind her sharply
“He sometimes called himself Ketspool Brown because he was deserter from the army. His name was Hopkins. You’ll find this out if you go to Greenwich, in Washington County. I married him there. He was an old man. You’ll find it was all right. Elder Mason, of the Baptist church, married us.”
“Did this Hopkins leave you any money?”
“Not very much” – regretfully. “I had the furniture and something over one hundred dollars from him. Hopkins was a bad man. He knew Mrs. Campbell, who was housekeeper for a rich farmer named Dugan, who lived near Greenwich, Mrs. Campbell stole $200 from Dugan, and she gave it to my husband, Hopkins, to keep for her. My husband gave her some medicine that killed her, they said she committed suicide. Then he never was happy afterwards. I heard him say often he was tired of living. He didn’t live long; he got his wish. In a short time after he died of typhoid fever, and I got the money that was left, which was something over one hundred dollars.”
“If your husband died in Arlington, why did you go to Philadelphia?”
Lizzie laughed to herself for a moment, looked at me as if much amused and then said, dryly; “Well, the truth of it is – I was married again.”
“To Halliday, you mean” “Oh, no!” Impatiently – “long before I saw Halliday. If you want to know,” she added, defiantly, “I had four husbands”
“Four husbands!” the Sheriff and I repeat in a breath.
“Yes – four!”
The Sheriff looks at her doubtingly
“Can’t you make an even half dozen?” he asks sarcastically
But Lizzie does not feed his sarcasm and doubt. She bursts in a hearty laugh and responds in utmost good humor: “Of course I can. You’ve hit it right. I’ve had six husbands.”
“And only twenty-eight years old!” the Sheriff exclaims angrily.
“And only twenty-eight years old,” repeats Lizzie. “You can prove it if you doubt me. I had four husbands in Greenwich, one in Rutland, Vt., and Paul Halliday. That makes six.”
“Any more, I say quietly.
“Isn’t that enough?” she answers evasively.
“It is certainly interesting,” I assure her. “Now give them to me in the order they came. Hopkins, number one, is dead and buried, and left you with $100 and a small child, Charlie Hopkins. How old was he?”
“About two years. I lived in all nearly three years with Hopkins. Shortly after he died I married Artemas Brewer. We were married by a Methodist minister in Fort Edward. Brewer was a bad old man. He was inclined to let me support him. Brewer was always chewing opium, same as Chinamen smoke, so he died shortly after I married him. It can be proved how he died. It was dropsy – dropsy of the heart. The doctor will tell you. I had a doctor attend him.”
“Having Brewer dead and buried, what did you do?”
“I became a little washerwoman. George Smith – his sister said his name was Peter – brought me his wash, and in a few weeks – it wasn’t months – he wanted me to marry him. He was an old soldier and drew a pension, so I married him. ‘Squire Tift, of Greenwich, performed the ceremony.”
What became of Smith, Lizzie pretended not to know. At any rate, after living with him for a few weeks, she got rid of him in some way and married another customer who brought his wash to her. This was Hiram Parkinson, a widower with three grown daughters. They were married by a Methodist minister in Shushan, Washington County. Parkinson was a stonemason, but Lizzie says, after living with him for a few months, she discovered that he was secretly married to Mrs. Ada Gunn, a widow of Greenwich, a member of the Baptist Church; so Lizzie, according to her story, put Parkinson out in the streets and, selling out her household effects, flitted, with her boy, to Bellow’s Falls, near Rutland, Vt. This man, Charles Playstel, is the only man she speaks of with the slightest sign of warmth or fondness, and even in his case I cannot say that the fondness is very strongly marked.
“Oh, he was a pretty man, short and stout and fair. He was a heavy drinker, dearie, but I never believed what people said about him. He was a painter and paperhanger by trade, and he made $5 a day. He was a lovely husband; he always gave all his money to me. He was good to my boy, too; I’ll say that of him.”
“Where were you married to Charlie Playstel?”
“I was married to him in Sandgate by a Baptist minister, whose name I have forgotten.”
“Well, what happened to Charlie Playstel, who is number five?”
“Nothing. He told me that he had pounded his first wife to death, so I ran away from him. I went to my mother, who was keeping house for my brother, John, a farmer in Sandgate, Playstel followed me there, and my folks were crazy to have me go back with him, so I ran away again and went to Mrs. John McClure, ini North Hoosick, near Troy, and in Rensselaer County. Mrs. McClure knows me all my life. She was a schoolmate of mine in Ireland.
“Did you stay there long?”
“No; I was afraid, for she let my mother know where I was, and I knew Charlie Playstel would be after me; so, sewing up my money in the lining of my petticoats, I ran away to Philadelphia.”
“And there?”
“I first worked for a family named Hamilton. I think they lived in a street called Handleton. A gingham factory was near their house, and their girls worked in it. I only stayed there a short time, and then I hired a little store in Kensington avenue, near Somerset. I kept fruit, candles, took in washing and had soup and a roll at noon for 10 cents. I was making lots of money, when the store was burned down for the insurance. It was in the night. I escaped in my petticoat, with my little boy in my arms. Then they took me to jail and put my boy in one home where I never saw him again.”
“How long were you in jail?”
“I was in the penitentiary for two years, I think. When my time was up the keeper got me a place with a Mrs. Brown. I was to work for my board and clothing, and she was to make a report of my conduct every month. I was staved so I ran away. I managed to get enough money to get to New York, and there I pawned some clothes and went to Newburg. Mrs. Smith, who keeps the intelligence bureau there, got me the place with old Paul Halliday, and not quite six weeks after I went to work for him we were married in Middletown by the REv. Mr. Birch, of the Methodist Episcopal Church”
She paused, swallowed something and added with evident satisfaction: “Now you know all about my six husbands”
“How much money did you get from the five?” I asked her.
“I got $600 from the entire lot. I had the money sewed in the lining of my petticoat when I went to Philadelphia. I started my store with some of it.”
“How was your store set on fire?”
“Oil was poured out of a lamp over the floor and a match set to it. I saw it all, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t speak because I was afraid I would be killed, but I lay in bed with my eyes open watching the whole thing done. Then I was arrested, convicted and sent to the penitentiary.”
“Now, having finished the history of your husbands, tell me truthfully if you murdered the McQuillan women at your home in Walker Valley.” To tempt her to tell me the true story I took out a roll of $200. “If you tell me the truth, I will give you $200 for your defense” I said, turning the bills over in my hand.”
With a cry of greed she clutched my wrists. “For God’s sake” she cried thickly, and with an eagerness that froze my blood, “give me that money and let me put it in my bed-tick and sleep on it!”
When I started to go she caught my dress and drew me back. “Give me a moment, for God’s sake, give me a moment!” she cried, and then began to plead for the money.
“What good is money to you?” the Sheriff asked. “You have no need for money so long as you are in here.”
“I want it; I want it to put in the bed-tick to sleep on it!” she cried beseechingly, but I went away.
“I never was afraid of her until I saw the gleam that came into her eyes when you showed her that money,” the Sheriff said when we were outside. Three reports of The World’s staff have verified Lizzie Halliday’s story. What they learned is told in the succeeding chapters. – NELLIE BLY
– An Unexplained Crime Near Walker Valley Which Is Now Cleared Up –
The body was lying face downward near a pool of water. The man had evidently been dead for some time. HIs coat was off, and his hat was floating on the surface of the water. There was a gaping would in the back of the head, and as Seaman turned the body over a bullet of large calibre fell out of the murdered man’s mouth. It had gone clear through the head and must have killed the victim instantly.
Coroner Rosch held an inquest next day, but it was not until two weeks had elapsed that the corpse was identified as that of Samuel Hutch. He was a peddler from Newburg, as Mrs. Halliday has said. He was quite well known in that part of the country, and was considered well off for one of his craft. He always had a large pack of notions, and had the reputation of carrying also a well-filled wallet.
Many people had seen rolls of bills in his purse, and it was generally through that he had at least $100 in his pocket whenever he was traveling over the country roads. The Coroner’s investigations disclosed the fact that Hutch was well acquainted with the country about there, and – the most significant of all – that he had come through Walker Valley, where old Paul Halliday lived, a day or two before that Sunday when his corpse was found. The Halliday home was twelve miles across country from the old lead mine. No one was ever arrested for the old peddler’s murder, and no suspicion attached at the time to Mrs. Halliday.
The crime was generally laid at the door of the wandering gypsies, who had at that time a headquarters not far from Mrs. Halliday’s home. The fact was brought out at the time of the discovery of the triple murder that Lizzie Halliday was always on friendly, even intimate, terms with the roving gypsies, and many people in that neighborhood still believe that the woman is of gypsy extraction. It will be remembered that the people of Sullivan County were greatly stirred up at the time of Mrs. Halliday’s arrest over a report that the gypsies would attempt to rescue her from the officers of the law.
Robbery was the unquestionable motive for the murder of poor Hutch. His pack was of considerable value, and the money on his person was of sufficient amount to tempt men or women with even less of the avarice which was always Mrs. Halliday’s strongest passion. Not a thing of value had been left on or about the body. The hat and coat which were found, were old and worn out. Even the dead man’s shoes had been taken away. Coroner Rosch, who lives in Wurtsboro, remembered the Hutch murder very well indeed when a reporter saw him last week.
The first point in Mrs. Halliday’s confession was confirmed. “So that Halliday woman confesses that she saw the peddler killed, does she?” said the Coroner to the World reporter. “Well, I wouldn’t put it past her. It is strange, though, that there was not the shadow of a reason for suspecting her of the crime at the time. Her home was about ten or twelve miles away as the birds fly. It was too far away to suspect any one with any certainty in Walker Valley. Yet it would have been a wily thing, and a likely thing, too, for Lizzie to have quietly followed that peddler and to have killed him away over at the lead mines.”
“Perhaps he passed her house in the morning. She might have asked him where he was going and then, giving him half a day’s start afoot, have followed him and overtaken him at the lead mines before sundown and killed him there. There is no doubt that man was murdered and robbery was the motive. If Lizzie Halliday admits a knowledge of that crime at all, it is pretty safe to say that she along committed it. She might have had some help from the gypsies at that. There was a hard crowd of them around Walker Valley, and Mrs. Halliday was very thick with the gang.”
Coroner Rosch said he believed that whoever killed the peddler was frightened away before completing the job. Otherwise the body would have been better concealed. Perhaps it would have been hidden in a more remote corner of the old mine. There was a deep pool of water near the post where the body was found” continued the Coroner, “and I feel pretty certain that it was the intention of the murderer to tie a weight to the corpse and sink it in that pool. If Mrs. Halliday was alone she may have found the task of dragging the body to the water too great for her, and so hurried away. If she was not alone, she sound of a passing wagon may have frightened away the assassins.”
– How Many Other Victim’s Bodies Lie Concealed in Their Hidden Recesses? –
The mountain country is very wild, and there are a dozen other spots in the Shawangank range where bodies might be concealed for years and never discovered unless the murderer made the place known. If Lizzie Halliday and her gang have been operating as the triple murderess confesses, there is nothing surprising in the fact that no more crimes have been discovered. Peddlers in that part of the country might disappear almsot any week and no one would ever thinking a second time of it. They come and go at all times.
Peddlers are the most frequent visitors to the little hamlets and the isolated farm-houses between Middletown and Walker Valley. The country people thereabouts, as a class, do not visit the large towns very often in the course of a year. They depend upon the peddlers principally to supply their modest wants. It is, in fact, the peddlers paradise, and every day the men with packs may be seen tolling over the mountains.
When nightfall comes they stop at the first house within walking distance and ask for shelter. Sometimes they pay for their lodging in money. More often they are given a bed and a cordial welcome, as the peddlers generally have a fund of anecdotes and stories and the news from town to tell. This makes them good company.
It is probable that many of these peddlers topped at Lizzie Halliday’s house, and it is not unreasonable to believe, as Mrs. Halliday cheerfully asserts, that for some of them it was their last night on earth. Walker Valley people, indeed, have reason to believe anything evil that is said of Lizzie Halliday. They say she would not hesitate to kill any one if she could obtain money from the body. Avarice was her ruling passion. She would hesitate at nothing to obtain money.
– Heart-Broken and Alone, He Lives Only to Avenge the Murder of His Loved Ones –
He sat bolt upright in a chair in the middle of the kitchen when a visitor called on him last week. The sitting figure was so motionless that it seemed at first as if life had left it. A big white dog followed the stranger into the house and to within a few feet of the old man sitting there, his dull eyes staring as if into space.
Thrice The World reporter addressed the old man. “Is this Thomas McQuillan?”
At last the figure spoke: “It is, still sitting, as you see, praying for night and all ? praying for day. We were so happy here, my wife, my daughter and I. Now I am sitting here alone and looking for death.” Tears started from the old man’s eyes. They rolled down his weather-beaten features and plashed form his chin on to his home-spun coat. The visitor spoke of the murderess.
“The wretch!” exclaimed the old man, “I loved my daughter as I loved my life, and my [illegible]. My God, my man, I tell you that I will have that fiend’s blood on my hands yet, if I have the least reason to believe that the law will not avenge me!”
There were signs of life in the old man now, sure enough. He rose and ? the floor, terribly excited. His voice trembled as he talked. [illegible} if I had had my way. When I went to the jail to see her I intended ot kill her like the beast she is. But they took my pistol from me. My friends meant well, but they did not know; no, they don’t know…[illegible] and took out upon the odl road and think, and think, and think, until my brain [illegible]..
Down from his place on the wall the old man tenderly lifted an ancient rifle, which had no rust on its barrell. Had the murderess been within his range at that moment her cimes would have been quickly avenged.
Thomas McQuillan did not admit that he knew Lizzie Halliday prior to the murder. He said he was acquained with one John McNally in Ireland, thirty years ago. After McQuillan had come to this country and settled in Newburg, some years later, he heard one day that McNally was living about a mile from him. He went over and hunted him up, and found that it was his old friend. McQuillan said he spent the night at the McNally house talking over old times. There was a daughter there about fourteen years old. McQuillan says that if the woman in Monticello jail is that daughter he only knew her from having met her on that one night twenty years ago. The old man said he did not know whether or not Lizzie Halliday and Lizzie or Maggie McNally, the daughter of his old friend, are the same.
McQuillan has three sons by his first wife – John, who is in the liquor business in Philadelphia, Charles, a teamster, and Nathaniel. None of the sons live in Newburg. John visited his father about six weeks ago for a few days. There is also a daughter by his first wife who lives in Bronxville, Canada. McQuillan is making arrangements to lease his little place near Newburg, and says he intends to start for Canada in a few weeks, to spend the remainder of his days with his daughter there.
Mrs. J. B. Smith, who keeps the employment office at No. 108 Water street, Newburg, told a World reporter that she had never sent any servants to old Paul Halliday, before she introduced him to the triple murderess. Mrs. Smith was emphatic. She crossed her hands over her heart and said dramatically: “I will swear to God that I had never seen him nor sent him any one until the day he walked in on me looking for a servant. Lizzie was then working for Mrs. Vaughn, who keeps the tea store, and she had just dropped in to see me. Halliday was asking me to get him a servant. Lizzie listened to him and then she said: “You can have me.”
“I thought she was joking and I reminded her that she had a good place already. ‘I’d sooner be with a man, she replied, laughing, and thereupon old Halliday said, ‘Well, you look like a lively girl and I’ll engage you.’ The next time I saw her after that was when she came here and stole the horses. She brought her marriage certificate to show me, and was ill at my house for three days.”
In June, 1891, when Lizzie Halliday was under arrest in Newburg for horse-stealing, Mrs. Smith was quoted as saying: “She came to me six months ago and represented that she had just landed from Ireland, and wanted a position. I obtained one for her with Mrs. Vaughn, and she remained there for a month. Lizzie, however, was desirous of going somewhere to keep house for a man and wife with no children. Paul Halliday, a charcoal-burrer, who had been in the office a number of times, chanced to drop in while Lizzie was there, and a bargain was struck between them. The girl at that time, had over $2000 in the bank, and the book was in her possession”
– Burned Her House for the Insurance and Imperilled Many Lives –
McQuillan knew who she was then. He had seen her at his father’s house in Newburg a dozen years before, when she was Maggie McNally. When his youngest brother, Nathaniel, was a boy, of seventeen, “Thanie” as they called him, “kept company” with Maggie, who was then fifteen and recently landed from Ireland.
Margaret McNally-Hopkins said she just came from her brother’s at Sandgate, Vt. She said Hopkins had been dead for some years, but she did not tell them four other husbands had occupied his shoes afterwards. Mrs. Hopkins said she also had no friends in Philadelphia, and seemed disposed to make a long stay, with the McQuillans, but Mrs McQuillan told her husband that ? hands were too soft and white for those of a working woman, and who had better be got rid of. So the next day Maggie went away.
In that part of Philadelphia known as Kensington, a district of small shops and factories and people who work with their hands for a living, there stood two little frame houses, nos. 2838 and 2840 Kensington avenue, between Hart lane and D street, and only a few rods below Somerset street. Robert Fitzpatrick, with his family, lived in the rear of one of those houses, and kept a little peddlers supply store in front. His daughter Annie ran the store. They owned the house next door, which at that time was vacant. On the other side John Manson lived with his family.
Maggie Hopkins came to the Fitzpatricks in the middle of January, 1888, and paid $30 for two months’ rent in advance for the five-room cottage, No. 2838 Kensington avenue. Her little boy Charlie was with her, and she announced that her mother would soon come to live with them. Mrs. Hopkins went to ? the furniture dealer at Frankford road and Huntington streets, and bought a bed, a mattress, six chairs, a ? and a table on the installment plan. They were to cost $37.50. Then she went to the office of the Queen Insurance Company, No. 221 Walnut street and took out a policy on her belongings for ?. She was to pay 10 cents a week in premiums. The first week she gave the collector 7 cents, and the next week she paid him 62? cents in advance.
[this section very difficult to read]
Mrs Hopkins had a few loaves of bread in her window and bought a barrel or two of cabbages and ? was all the stock that any one ever saw in her little shop. She and the boy lived upstairs. She used to ask Annie Fitzpatrick next door a? ? many questions about the movement of the policeman on that beat, and was especially anxious to learn how often they passed her place in the early morning hours.
The great blizzard of 1888 was raging in all its fury at 5 o’clock on the morning of March 14, 1888, when the Fire Department was called to Margaret Hopkins’s house. The fireman found a bucket filled with cloth and paper saturated with oil in Mrs.Hopkins’s bedroom, and they also discovered that every bit of the furniture had been moved from the house the night before. Fitzpatrick’s store next door was burned down, as well as the house that Mrs. Hopkins’s had evidently put fire to. Manson’s house on the other side was burned to the ground. The Fitzpatricks and the Mansons barely escaped with their lives. They lost all their belongings.
Two days after the fire Mrs. Hopkins and her little boy, both thinly clad, were found wandering in the streets of Camden, NJ, across the river from Philadelphia. The woman was suffering from peritonitis, the doctors at the Homoeopathic Hospital said. She told them that she had been driven out of her boarding house in Manawauk, and that two weeks before she had had a severe fall.
When Detectives Geyer and Downy came over from Philadelphia to arrest her for arson Mrs. Hopkins assumed to be violently insane. She had her insurance policy in the bosom of her dress. The hospital doctors said she was shaming. She was given a hearing before a police magistrate, and on April 12 was tried before Judge Hare, in the Court of Quarter Sessions. The evidence of arson was overwhelming, and no defense was offered except that the woman shammed insanity in court and begged to be allowed to see her little boy again. The boy had been given in charge of the Society to Protect Children from Cruelty, and was placed in a home. Mrs. Hopkins was found guilty by the jury, and on May 4 was sentenced to two years in the Eastern Penitentiary. She served her term in prison, and very soon after leaving there appeared in Newburg.
After Mrs. Hopkins’s first preliminary hearing, an old man, with a long gray beard, whom the Fitzpatricks had seen peddling writing paper about Kensington, came to Annie Fitzpatrick and asked: “What did yez do wid my widow that lived next door?”
Then he told Miss Fitzpatrick that he had been in the habit of stopping with Mrs. Hopkins, and that his valise was there the night before the fire. Mrs. Hopkins had urged him to stay there that night, but the old man said he felt afraid for some reason, and went to his own room on the Frankford road. He congratulated himself on his narrow escape, and added significantly: “When I heard of the fire, I thought that was my widow’s house.” The old man was never seen in that neighborhood again.
– Mrs. Halliday Fired the House After Locking Her Helpless Stepson in His Room –
When he returned home in the evening Paul Halliday found his little house a mass of smoking ruins. It had been burned down during the day. Lizzie coolly informed her husband that his son John had been burned to a crisp in the ruins, and this was found to be the case. He had gone into the house, so she said, to save her from the fire, and had been unable to escape, while she had succeeded in getting out.
The old man came to Newburg afterward and, with tears in his eyes, said that he believed that his wife had set fire to the house in his absence after she had first locked John Halliday up in a room, from which he had been unable to escape. In support of this belief, he said the door of this particular room and the woodwork that surrounded it were not so badly burned, but that he found that the door was still locked. The key he found in the possession of [no break in the text here, but seems to be a line missing that the key was in the possession of Lizzie, as noted in other reports, replaced by the following which is again repeated at the end of the next paragraph] partially reconciled old man Halliday to his wife’s incendiary acts.
On May 26 the old man’s barn and mill were destroyed by fire. Lizzie afterward admitted to him that she had started the fire, as the barn was an old one and she wanted a new one erected in its place. Both the house and barn were insured, and the money was paid over by the companies. This may have partially reconciled old man Halliday to his wife’s incendiary acts.
– The Fiend’s Attempt to Kill Old George Smith, in Greenwich, Seven Years Ago –
Maggie soon tired of old George Smith and she laid her plans to leave Greenwich with another man, to whom she had been secretly married, and who had more money than the old army veteran. ? George Smith must be got out of the way. She decided to kill him by poison, ? ? when her husband ? ? ? his wife ? ? ? to make a cup of tea, ? ? she had ? ? for ? ? ? ? either milk and sugar ? ? in his tea and he told Maggie ? ? ? [rest of this paragraph very difficult to read]
“Are you trying to poison me, Maggie!” he cried. For an answer his wife gave a yell of laughter, had run from the room. Smith was to frightful ?. He ? ? ? ? a neighbor ran in and was dispatched for Dr. Gray. When the physician arrived he administered an ? had after half an hour’s work Smith was pronounced out of danger.
Search was made for the tea remaining in the cup, but it had disappeared, and so had the woman disappeared. The physician told Smith that his escape was a very narrow one, and advised him to be very careful in future about eating food prepared by his wife. Maggie Hopkins-Smith did not come around the house for two days, but when she appeared her aged husband forgave her, and the lived together a few weeks longer.
– A Deserter and Debaucher and Then a Crippled Army Pensioner
A crime preceded Maggie’s first marriage.
Charles Hopkins was a carpenter in Greenwich, about fifteen years ago. His ?respectability was not of the best, and it was pretty ?generally known that he was a deserter from the English army. For some reason or other he was rather popular among the women. A Mrs. Campbell, whose husband had gone over into Vermont to do some work, became housekeeper for Matthew Dugan, a wealthy farmer of Hebron. She was in love with Hopkins, and had made preparations to marry him, notwithstanding the fact that her husband was alive. Hopkins induced the woman to rob old Dugan of $29 which he kept in a trunk in the house. Mrs. Campbell gave the money to Hopkins, who had made it a condition of their marriage.
As soon as the $200 was in his possession Hopkins disappeared. He wrote a letter to Mrs. Campbell, which convinced that unfortunate woman that he would never repair the wrong he had done her, and one night she took poison and was found dead in bed the next morning. No one ever knew where she obtained the poison.
After her death, Hopkins returned to Greenwich, and, against the wishes of all her family, Maggie McNally was married to him. The boy, Charlie, the only child the woman has ever had, was born a year later. Hopkins and his wife moved ot Arlington, in Vermont, fifteen miles east of Greenwich, and there Hopkinds died. He was working in Reed’s brush factory, and before his death he had a fever. Mrs. Duff Allen, one of Maggie’s sister, who lives in Greenwich now, went to the funeral. She says the doctor told her that Hopkins had some throat and lung trouble, contracted by inhaling the particles of bristles used in the factory. No one in Arlington or Greenwich, at the present day, doubts that Hopkins died a natural death.
Maggie Hopkins and her boy Charlie came back to Greenwich to live in two rooms over an old blacksmith shop near the railroad depot. Maggie took in washing, and occasionally went out to service. In a few months she married again. Her second husband was Artemas Brewer, a village character.
Brewer had a small pension and was crippled as much by rheumatism as from the wounds he received in the war. He was a little short man, with an enormously large head, straggly whiskers and very large feet. He walked with the aid of two canes. What Maggie ever married him for, unless it was the pension, nobody could guess.
She led Brewer a pretty hard life. He had acquired the opium habit and used to take the drug in the form of pills. Maggie delighted in hiding his pills from him. Wherever his rheumatism gave him an extra twinge she took pleasure in driving him out in the yard to chop wood. She was strong and hearty herself, and fond of walking – “tramping it” she called it – and she used to make pool old Art. trot along behind her with his two canes and his ?lously short steps, Maggie was very fond of her boy at times and she used to dress him out fantastically with white starched kilt skirts and lace in the winter, and gay-colored ribbons all over his dresses in summer. She had moods, and when she was in one of her tantrums, as the villagers called them, she would rain blows on poor old Art. Brewer, or her little boy, just as the fancy seized her, Sometimes she beat the child most cruelly. A year of this sort of married life, was enough for Brewer, and one night he died. An old army comrade, named George Smith, held poor Ar. in his arms as he breathed his last. The doctors said that dropsy and rheumatism and a complication of other diseases brought about Brewer’s death. Greenwich people said it was a wonder he lived as long as he did, with Maggie Hopkins for a wife.
– Mrs Halliday’s Third and Fourth Matrimonial Partners Are Alive To-Day –
Parkinson’s visits to the widow became so frequent that the villagers were not at all surprised when he gave up his room at the hotel one day and went to live over the blacksmith shop. Everyone supposed that he and Maggie were married, although it was pretty well understood that Mrs. Ada Gunn, widow of John Gunn, who lived up on the hill, was also a wife of Parkinson.
After Art Brewer had been dead about a year Hiram Parkinson left Greenwich and went to Arlington, Vt., to work. About this time George Smith, and old soldier and the comrade in whose arms poor Brewer had died, was living in what was known as “the flatiron house” on Church street. Smith was, and is today, the butt of all the jokers in the village. He drives a lame horse hitched to a ?-down wagon through the streets and the little boys hoot at him as he passes. He was always a harmless old fellow with a weakness for hard cider and beer. He begins every other sentence of his conversation with the words “I’m an old soldier”.
Smith was a caretaker for a piece of property and looked after some horses, he had the flatiron house rent free and one day Maggie came to him and suggested that she be his housekeeper. Smith agreed to furnish the provisions and Maggie was to do the cooking. She and her little boy were to live in the front part of the house.
After a few days Maggie began urging Smith to marry her. The old fellow said it was a serious mater, and he would have to think it over. “Besides that,” he said, “you’re married to Hi Parkinson.”
Maggie said she would take her oath she had never been married to Parkinson and that their relations had only been that of washerwoman and customer. Poor simple George Smith took the woman to Attorney James White’s office, and when she had prepared before the lawyer her declaration that she was not Mrs. Parkinson, the old soldier accompanied the woman before Squire Otis Teft and they were married. Maggie asked for a certificate and got it.
A few nights after the wedding the bride opened her trunk to put away her marriage certificate.
“I can see how now kneeling on the floor before that trunk,” said Smith to a World reporter last week. “It was poor Art Brewer’s trunk. She pulled out a bundle of papers and there were three just alike. She handed me one, and I looked and saw it was the certificate of her marriage to Hopkins. Then she handed me another.
“That’s Art Brewer’ says I. She laughed, and started to put the third one back in the trunk. I wanted to see it, but she wouldn’t let me. Finally she handed it over. I’ll be darned if it wasn’t her certificate to Parkinson. They was married a year before at Snusan by a Methodist minister.
“Why, Maggie,” I says, “you took oat that you wasn’t married to Hiram.’
“Oh,’ says she, “I’m old and crafty. If I’d told you that, you wouldn’t have married me.’ I didn’t know what to do, so I just did nothing and kept on living with her.” Maggie led Smith a livelier dance than she had given Brewer. She broke open an old satchel in which he kept $14.50 which he had saved up, and she refused to return it to him. She had her spells of ungovernable temper every little while and tore around the house smashing furniture. Old George was especially proud of a fine feather bed which his first wife had made for him in Iowa. Maggie took a dislike to this feather bed and one day she ripped it all to pieces and scattered the ducks’ and geese feathers around the street. Incidentally she assaulted a Mrs. Barringer, who occupied a part of the flatiron house, and whom old George had asked to protect his feather bed. Maggie was arrested for this.
Squire Mandell’s criminal docket shows that on June 24, 1886, Margaret Smith came before him charged with assault. Mrs. Barringer testified that Maggie tore into her apartments in a high state of excitement.
“I asked her what she wanted and she said, ‘By God, I’m going to have those feather beds.’ With that she struck me, knocked me down and dragged me to the door. Then she got hold of the bed and ripped it to pieces with a big knife.”
When Maggie was arrested she feigned insanity. She came into the Justice’s court with a petticoat tied around her waist and carrying her shoes in her hand. Her hair was floating over her shoulders and she danced and sang and cried and raved, and as Squire Mandell said last week, “took on at a great rate” She couldn’t fool the hard-headed country justice, however, and he fined her $12.50. Maggie suddenly recovered her reason and begged her husband to pay her fine. George hadn’t a cent to his name and then Maggie, with a very cunning look, asked him if he would pay the fine if she told him where that $14.50 was? George agreed and the woman disclosed the hiding-place of the stolen money. It was under her bed-tick at home.
Parkinson came back from Arlington about this time and Maggie frequently stayed away from home all night. Smith says he had the police out looking for her several times and they told him she was with Parkinson. Then Maggie tried to poison her husband, as told in a preceding chapter.
One night when the old soldier returned form work he found his house locked up and, after climbing in through a window, discovered that it had been stripped of everything movable. Maggie was gone and George Smith never saw her again. She had been seen driving toward Shusan with Parkinson, and George afterwards learned that she worked in the hotel there for a little while and then went to her brother John’s in Sandgate. “I followed her up,” said Smith last week, “I thought I was lucky to escape with my life.”
– Turned from Her Brother’s Door the Woman “Tramps It” Along the Connecticut River –
She tramped it along the Connecticut River, finally turning up at Bellows Falls, Vt. Here she met Charles Playstel, who was a painter. They were married, but only lived together two weeks. Playstel is not remembered around that part of the country now. It was not long after this when Maggie turned up in Philadelphia.
– Mrs Halliday Fooled the Doctors and Went to an Insane Asylum Instead of to Prison –
Glynn always said that he did not know who the woman was. She offered to pay him $3 a day if he would go out on the trip and drive the team for her. Glynn went, and on the way the couple arranged to pass themselves oft as husband and wife. The woman confided to him that her idea was to trade horses as they travelled, getting the best of the trade on each deal, until eventually they both became rich from their profits.
When Liveryman Whitbeck started out after his stolen property he had a hard time in recovering possession. He found one horse here and another there, and the wagon was way up on the mountain, and in every case they new owners made a fight before giving up the property. Mrs. Halliday and Glynn were both arrested, charged with horse stealing. Glynn was finally released.
As soon as she was placed in a cell the woman began to act violently. Dr. Lewis E. Harnmore, a young physician, at that time in charge of Newburg Jail, declared she was insane. Old man Halliday came down and tried to set the officers to recover the $31 which his wife had stolen from him before starting on the horse-trading trip. When he heard that Dr. Hanmore had said his wife was insane Halliday expressed great contempt for the physician’s opinion.
The old man said his wife was perfectly sane, and that she was simply acting a crazy woman to escape punishment. When her case was called for examination Mrs. Halliday shrieked and cried and raved and tore her hair, as she had always done when arrested for crime. She was acquitted of the charge of horse stealing on the ground of insanity and was committed to the asylum at Matteawan. She was released from there last May in the custody of her husband. The doctors said she was cured.
In November, 1873, the rest of the McNally family came to America. The old father died nine years ago. He was out of his head for years before his death. His wife died at Sandgate in 1891. With the father and mother came Frank McNally, who is thirty-two years old now, and lives in Londonderry; Mary McNally, who is now Mrs. John Long, living at No. 53 Jones street, Newburg; Nancy McNally, now the wife of James Allen, a farmer at Hebron; Martha McNally, who lives with her husband, Duff Allen, on a farm just outside of Greenwich, and Eliza Margaret, the youngest daughter, who is now in Monticello Jail.
The McNally girls all worked in and around Newburg, and the McQuillan boys were their companions. Before Martha and Maggie, the two younger sisters, had come to America, old Tom McQQuillan’s first wife died, and he married again. When Maggie, who is thirty-five years old now, was a buxon lass of fifteen she was “keeping company” with young Nathaniel McQuillan, then seventeen years old.
When Maggie was in the insane asylum at Matteawan, Aggie Long and Libbie Dewey, two nieces of hers, happened to visit the institution. They thought they recognized their aunt, Mrs. Hopkins, in the woman whom the attendants said was Mrs. Brown, and a few days later Mrs. Dewey, who was Maggie’s favorite sister, went to see her. The attendant would not allow Mrs. Dewey to speak to her sister, but a glance of recognition passed between them.
On Oct. 4, last Mrs. Lizzie Halliday, from her cell in Monticello Jail, dictated a letter to her sister Jane. It did not reach Mrs. Patrick Dewey’s home in Troy until Oct. 12, having been addressed to Greenwich. Mrs. Dewey was dead, but her husband and her daughters opened the letter. They showed it to a World reporter. In the ten pages which some attache of the Sullivan County Sheriff’s office wrote for Mrs. Halliday there occurs the following:
“I write to inform you that I am in prison at Monticello, charged with the killing of three persons, which I do not understand.”
“Halliday had six children. The oldest son of Halliday also wanted to marry me, saying he was younger then his father, and that he had applied for a pension as well as his father. You will observe by this that the father was quite old, having had a son in the army, and the son was married three times and had six children and said his son killed all three of his wives. The son is drawing a pension of $13 per month, and the father, whom I was coaxed to marry, received $12 per month. During last summer a man arrived at my house and my husband made me acquainted with him. This man was introduced to me as one McQuillan. He had whiskey with him and had been drinking. McQuillan stayed all night and left next day. My husband invited him to remain a week. I told my husband if McQuillan remained a week he would have to take me to an asylum, and then the two commenced drinking their whiskey and talke of trading wives.
“I have two lawyers called Smart to defend me. I will let you know when my trial comes on; and I wish you could be here and bring Attorney White with you.
—–
Miss Nellie Bly and The World reporters who have listened to Mrs. Halliday’s words and have carefully verified her various statements believe that the full measure of her atrocities is not yet known. Even Mrs. Halliday’s excellent memory is apparently unable to recall accurately her full list of her victims.
